ACCOMODATION AND OTHERING: TRANSNATIONAL PREMEDIATION IN THE MODERNIST EPICS “THE WASTE LAND” AND ULYSSES
ACCOMODATION AND OTHERING: TRANSNATIONAL PREMEDIATION IN THE MODERNIST EPICS “THE WASTE LAND” AND ULYSSES

Summary/Abstract: The paper reviews the discourse of two high modernist epics, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s Ulysses, famous for the amplitude of their intellectual, cosmopolitan outlook in the horizon of the early 1920s. We wish to see the difference between the ways they transcended borders, by virtue of their generic definition, as epics, and as programmatic modernist experiments, on the one hand, and the priorities of recent discourses which have adopted the transnational agenda, on the other hand. The focus on the dynamic of accommodation and othering aligns cosmopolitan internationalism in these canonical texts with the cultural, civic and political constants presupposed by transnationalism. Reaching out from the alterity and conviviality connection, there emerge two common denominators: the capacity to overcome essentialism by accommodating exilic selves and the inauguration of loci for symbolic rearticulation in post-traumatic contexts. In addition, modernist cosmopolitanism stands out through the way it resorts to irony and parallelisms of the past with the present for overcoming exhausted and exhausting essentialism or parochial stereotyping. The paper points to the intersection of two sets: the old modernist (and the traditional comparative literature) discourse practices, as one set, and the newer (critical and emancipatory) transnationalist set of discourses. The mechanisms of cultural memory and mediation, in particular, explain what is specific for this intersection. The complexity of “The Waste Land” and Ulysses suggests that the modernist avant-garde premediated not a few of the currently trendy intellectual, academic and cultural themes. This creates a tradition of transnationalism even though, in former ages, the political dimension of literary discourses bore different names.

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